


Patient Minds

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Bars and Pubs, Conversations, Developing Friendships, Dialogue Heavy, Gen, Male Friendship, World War II, silent war-haunted men, war and the memory of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 12:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13410927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: It isn't often that disciplinary paperwork crosses Commander Bolton's desk. But after the evacuation, it does.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gentle_herald](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentle_herald/gifts).



> A one-shot written for Gentle_Herald's prompt: Commander Bolton and Mr. Dawson, sharing a drink. Coincidences have been gleefully manufactured, and the realities of petrol rationing willfully ignored. Chapters are written in alternating POV. The title is taken from Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth."

Ordinarily, a civilian’s dereliction of duty to the Navy would never have crossed his desk, entered his consciousness. But nothing was as usual, after the evacuation. He had never spoken of it, of course. He had given his signature where it was needed, his commendation where it was asked for, and that was that. He still asks himself what it was that betrayed his feelings to his subordinates. He is not even sure whose instinct it was, first, that resulted in the slim little folder arriving finally on his desk.

The Moonstone. A name from childhood, of rainy afternoons, magic, mystery, when threats had to be invented from without, and could always be countered from within. Dawson – a name obscure, without associations. Yet this obscure man had defied the bureaucrats, and then the waves, and then the guns. Bolton runs a hand through his hair. Why? He looks at the list of names – men carried by the ship, terrified boys and weary soldiers, so much human weight in a small vessel, so much chaos on a boat designed for fishing, for pleasure trips. Again an insistent boyhood memory, this one of sun and salt air.

Commander Bolton scrubs his hands over his face. Then, taking up his pen, he cancels out the crime of The Moonstone and her pilot. And having done so, he arranges his own transport to the coast.

He arrives in the small town weary, and feeling his age. It is a relief to sit in the single pub, alone. He knows it is an illusion, a false simulacrum of peace, as it is of leisure. He sits, and sips his ale as slowly as he can. He allows himself to drift. He is surrounded by the screams of the dying, and by the desperate, devoted looks of men hollow-eyed with fatigue. 

“Dawson.” Abruptly Bolton shakes himself free of his reverie. The man who has just entered the pub is smaller than he had imagined. He is Bolton’s contemporary. He moves through the world unobtrusively, hands half-clenched at his sides in a sailor’s readiness. He is dark as Bolton himself is fair, slight of build and sad of eye. Looking at him, Bolton finds himself unable to decide whether he would move through any street unremarked, or draw any trained eye with his banked intensity. 

“Captain Dawson?” says Bolton. “Let me buy you that drink.”


	2. Chapter 2

Dawson looks up at the stranger, instantly on the alert. “Thanks.” It seems the safest rejoinder. It postpones engagement until he knows with whom he’s dealing. He nods in confirmation and reassurance at Tom, pulling the pint of his usual. 

“Mr.,” he says, as it is slid over to him, as he raises it to his dangerous benefactor.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s Mr.,” he repeats, very softly. “I’m not in the Navy. Journalist?”

The stranger’s smile is fleeting, transformative. “No,” he says quietly, and meets Dawson’s gaze with eyes of a startling blue. “Navy.”

There is silence between them for a long minute. Behind them a darts game is begun. 

Dawson takes a long sip of his pint. Then he takes a risk. “If you were going to arrest me,” he says, “you wouldn’t have bought me that drink.”

The other man’s laughter is silent, and he seems taken aback by it. Looking sidelong at him, Dawson wonders how much he’s been sleeping, how recent is the silver at his temples. “No,” he says, “I wouldn’t.”

The ensuing silence is longer still. Dawson takes stock of the things the stranger has not asked about: the haunted savagery of the shivering soldier, and the heartbreaking docility of the frightened, resolute boys who drank his tea, wore his blankets, obeyed his orders. The youth – God, the youth – of the man who could be civil to Peter in the moment of his salvation from near-certain death, and useful in an emergency less than an hour later. The silences of his own son; the rhetoric of the newspapers concerning the funeral of a sixteen-year-old boy. 

“I’m told,” says the stranger, contemplating the back of the bar, “that The Moonstone disobeyed direct orders.” Dawson lets that hang in the air. “I’m told,” says the stranger again, “that she sailed out under her own command, in express defiance of law… I’ve forgotten the relevant paragraph.”

“I haven’t,” says Dawson. 

“And,” continues the stranger, as if he had not been interrupted, “that she took on a number of men far exceeding her own capacity.”

It is Dawson’s turn to laugh, to be startled by his own laughter. He draws again at his pint. 

“Damn fine sailing, that,” says the stranger.

“Damn fine boys,” says Dawson, as quietly as before. “Damn fine men.”

The stranger swallows. “Yes,” he says hoarsely. Dawson watches the workings of his jaw, and waits, but he does not speak again.

Dawson rolls his shoulders back. “Too many good men lost,” he says, eyeing the stranger. “This war and the last.”

The stranger meets his eyes, and stretches out his hand. “Commander Bolton,” he says.

Dawson reaches to grip the other man’s hand, and very slowly, he grins. “Commander Bolton,” he echoes. “Pleasure. Same again?”


End file.
